The Marketplace Master^TM is a monthly email publication on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing, LLC.

About This Issue
Before we delve into next month's topic of data mining, we have one more issue on breaking out of the pack with differentiation.

Talk Back: We want to hear your feedback on the issues raised by these newsletters. See below for this month's Talk Back feedback and learn how The Strategic Offsites Group developed its strategy to be different.

Break Out of the Pack

In previous issues we’ve discussed why you should differentiate your firm, and methods that our research respondents have found successful. How you choose to differentiate your firm can mean the difference between breaking out of the pack and being mired in the middle.

While there is no exact recipe that is going to work for all firms, the most effective differentiation strategies are based upon the following:

By service offerings -- “We specialize in forensic accounting services,” or “We are the premier firm to offer revenue-cycle-outsourcing services.”

By client needs addressed -- “We only work with clients that are experiencing strategic alignment challenges,” or “We only help clients when they need governance guidance.”

Talk Back
For many professional service firms, creating and implementing a differentiation strategy is a relatively new idea. Results are still largely unknown. We talked with Logan Chandler, partner of The Strategic Offsites Group, LLC about how the firm developed its strategy to be different.

"During our firm’s earliest stages, we were convinced that differentiation was critical to success, even to the point of naming the firm. As we considered our firm’s name, we reviewed the way other firms portrayed themselves and named themselves. It was impossible to tell what they did at any level of precision. Too many consultants operate at 50,000 feet. They grow client by client. They say, ‘Workshops? Oh, we do that too!’ We decided to be specific about what we wanted to do: design and manage offsites to drive strategy alignments. For us, it’s about being ‘an inch-wide and a mile-deep.’ Ultimately, we picked a name that telegraphed how we are different. We wanted to be memorable in our clients’ minds. We did not want to blend into everyone else. "

Chandler remarked about The Strategic Offsites Group’s plan to deepen its differentiation in order to stay ahead of inevitable competition.

"By focusing on a narrow strategy you create a level of knowledge that is hard to copy. Every one of our offsites last year was a function of unique processes and proprietary methodologies that we created and that we alone practice. Our process is different; it’s based on a model that no one else has created. But we know, as we enter the next phase of our firm’s growth, that we have to go even deeper to maintain a favorably unique edge. So we’ve set up a program to gather research-appropriate data at every engagement and harvest it in order to deepen our proprietary knowledge, and to make us more effective in helping our clients with their alignment issues. We also plan focused qualitative and quantitative research on the structures that allow executives to align most optimally."

The Strategic Offsites Group’s differentiation platform meets many of the criteria for competitive effectiveness. Value for clients, protectability, credibility, compelling attractiveness, sustainability and narrow-focus.

Next month’s issue of The Marketplace Master is about getting value from data mining. If you use data mining for strategic advantage (e.g. analyzing contact database information to discern patterns about clients’ buying behavior) please send us a note and we may feature your firm.